‘Get rid of your wifi cameras’: Mom says someone hacked into their child’s Owlet baby monitor, would talk to her son during the night
After purchasing a baby monitor camera to keep an eye on her son, TikTok user Kurin (@kurinadele) says her camera was hacked when her password was exposed through a data leak, with no notification from the company.
In her video that has drawn over 3.8 million views as of Sunday, 'crunchy' mom content creator Kurin says she was putting her son back to bed when she realized the Owlet monitoring camera in his room was unplugged. When she asked her husband to plug it back in, her son begged her not to.
@kurinadele Get rid of your wifi cameras!!!!! #owletcamera #babymonitorhack ♬ original sound - Kurin Adele
"I asked my husband, I was like, 'Hey, can you plug his camera back in?' and my son starts crying and he's like, 'I don't want my camera plugged in, I don't want my camera plugged in, someone talks to me at night and it scares me. Someone wakes me up and talks to me and I'm scared, I don't want my camera plugged in,'" Kurin says.
She says her son told them that the person talking to him through the camera claimed to be his parents, which is why the issue did not come to their attention sooner.
When she and her husband went to change the password for their Owlet cameras, she says a notification stating that the password had appeared in a data leak popped up, but that they had never received any kind of notification from the company about information being exposed.
"Who the heck knows how long someone has had our password and has been messing with my son?" she says in the video. "Owlet never notified us."
She says she would be purchasing a different type of baby monitoring camera that does not use Wi-Fi and cannot be hacked to replace her Owlet camera.
The Daily Dot reached out to Kurin and Owlet directly via email regarding the video.
Several viewers said they also had similar security issues with their Wi-Fi-based monitoring cameras or had seen others have this experience.
"This same thing happened with our owlet camera," one commenter wrote. "I was walking past my sons room and I heard someone telling him to 'calm down buddy.. it’s ok.'"
"This exact situation happened to us and our owlet went straight in the trash," another user claimed. "Immediately switched to infant optics."
"I saw this years ago with another family and never got a wifi camera because of it," one user shared. "We used the old school monitors instead."
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